star wars star wars star wars
May. 23rd, 2024 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterExchange fic
So, May the Fourth Exchange happened! (This post has been sitting in drafts for a while now. Oops.) Firstly: just look at my gifts. LOOK at them. I have been spoilt rotten and I'm still pinching myself a little that so much rarepair goodness came my way. I really, REALLY do not have time to be doing exchanges at the moment, but Mt4 is my one big do-or-die event of the year and I have zero regrets for the full body push it took to cram the thing into my schedule.
Secondly, I want to blather a bit about the fic I wrote, because it got wildly out of control in a way that was both very fun and very exhausting. (There's also a punchline. Please stick around for the punchline! I'm still screaming about it a little inside.) My plans of writing something short and sweet went out the window as soon as I got my assignment email, matching me to my very favourite Star Wars person who has gifted me many amazing things and whose letters are always chock full of inspiring prompts. I quickly decided I was going to write for their Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Jacen Syndulla request, which is a decent bite to chew - a five-person polyship starring one guy who has tried to kill three of the others and another guy who doesn't even feature in the same canon - but no worries, right? I was thinking, I probably need about 5k words to do it justice. I can manage 5k even on my current ultra-limited writing time.
Then I was casting around for a plot to hang the ship off, and I decided to draw from one of the cartoons. It's been a few years since I watched Resistance, I was only ever mildly fannish about it and never actually made it all the way to the end, but that wasn't going to matter: I could rewatch some key episodes, skim some Wookieepedia summaries, and since I only needed it as a backdrop, the finer details wouldn't matter. It would let me sneak in a quick cameo appearance by one of recip's other ships but wouldn't eat into my wordcount.
But then I started rewatching Resistance and got waaaay more invested than I planned to. I fell in love with the recip's other ship and developed all sorts of feelings about the characters. My cameo started turning into a major chunk of the fic, and my rewatch was threatening to encroach on my writing time: I'd been watching during windows of downtime when I was too tired to do anything else, which worked fine when it was just a few key episodes but wasn't enough for the more substantial canon review I now needed. Still, I said, she'll be right. My wordcount might blow out to 8k or so but I can get this done if I focus.
But as I was figuring out my plot and trying to prioritise which emotional arcs I'd have time for and which ones would have to get cut (a problem for me, with so many characters I love in play), the prospect of one more cameo kept niggling at the back of my mind. Qi'ra! From Solo! Recip loves her, she's in charge of a crime cartel, how cool would it be if I made her my antagonist instead of the disposable OCs I'd been planning to throw in? Trouble was, with disposable OC antagonists, it was very clear that any plot I came up with would be just a flimsy pretext for ship interactions. If I was going to have an actual beloved character driving things, I would have to do her justice, too. I cannot overstate to you guys how much plotty fic is not my forte. I can do it, and I love doing it, but I'm painfully slow at it - like, I can dash off a couple of thousand words of smut or banter or introspection in the time it takes me to produce a paragraph or two of action. So at this point I was having to go cap in hand to my husband for some major extra help with childcare because writing during naptimes was no longer going to cut it.
Thankfully, he was amazing about it. Poor man sacrificed almost all of his own free time to get me the space I needed to finish what ended up being 13.5k of some of the most complex, too-many-balls-in-the-air-at-once writing I've attempted in years. Here it is, in all its glory! I'm absurdly proud of it, and my imagination is still in overdrive about the whole extended version it spawned in my head. It even has 4 kudos, which is 3 more kudos than I ever expected it to get.
Anyway - now we're at the punchline - reveals day came around and it turns out my recip not only wrote for me in return but basically joined me in a surprise round robin! Like, theirs is the get-together, mine is the three-years-later established relationship. Same core cast, same canon divergence, same complicated polyship. If the premise of 'Ben survives Exegol and goes on to have complicated relationships with a whole bunch of Resistance heroes' sounds even a tiny bit appealing to you, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:
TV shows
As mentioned above, I've been (re)watching Resistance and enjoying it SO much more than I remember doing last time. It's first and foremost a fun, goofy show aimed at a somewhat younger audience than the other cartoons, but it also has some really thoughtful messages about how far right organisations recruit by exploiting people's natural cravings for belonging and security. The whole cast are pretty much all lovable, but I'm especially taken with Synara and Tamand their glaringly obvious romantic chemistry that deserved so much more screentime than it ended up getting.
I also started The Bad Batch, which until now I'd correctly but misleadingly lumped in with TCW as Clone Stuff(TM). Like yes they're clones, and Clone Stuff(TM) doesn't usually interest me very much, but these clones are living their best Accidental Child Acquisition lives! If Disney wants to milk The Mandalorian's success forever by churning out an endless stream of gruff action heroes adopting and protecting small children, I think I'm actually okay with that. I'm still early in season 1 so no idea where it's all going, but I'm enjoying myself a lot so far.
Comics
I read Crimson Reign and Hidden Empire, in which Qi'ra leads Crimson Dawn and an assortment of other criminals and miscreants (prominently including the Knights of Ren) on a campaign to end the rule of the Sith. The plot revolves a McGuffin that can literally freeze people in time and is a bit silly even by Star Wars standards, but it clips along at a great pace and has some truly heartwrenching Qi'ra moments. It's a fairly large crossover event, and I've grabbed all the other tie-ins that my library had, so I'll be reading those at some point soon. Doctor Aphra is involved!
Video games
I started playing Squadrons, which is the first flight simulator I've ever touched. This experience has taught me that I don't like playing flight simulators, but I do like watching them played, and luckily my husband is not the kind of man you have to pressure very hard to pick up a game controller. It's an enjoyably different perspective on the big Star Wars adventure, since you're playing ordinary pilots on both the Rebel and Imperial side, nobody important. There's also an embarrassingly hot Imperial NPC named Terisa Kerrill, who's portrayed by an Aussie actress, which is nice! It's not Mandatory Star Wars Content by any stretch, but it's a good bit of fun.
So, May the Fourth Exchange happened! (This post has been sitting in drafts for a while now. Oops.) Firstly: just look at my gifts. LOOK at them. I have been spoilt rotten and I'm still pinching myself a little that so much rarepair goodness came my way. I really, REALLY do not have time to be doing exchanges at the moment, but Mt4 is my one big do-or-die event of the year and I have zero regrets for the full body push it took to cram the thing into my schedule.
Secondly, I want to blather a bit about the fic I wrote, because it got wildly out of control in a way that was both very fun and very exhausting. (There's also a punchline. Please stick around for the punchline! I'm still screaming about it a little inside.) My plans of writing something short and sweet went out the window as soon as I got my assignment email, matching me to my very favourite Star Wars person who has gifted me many amazing things and whose letters are always chock full of inspiring prompts. I quickly decided I was going to write for their Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Jacen Syndulla request, which is a decent bite to chew - a five-person polyship starring one guy who has tried to kill three of the others and another guy who doesn't even feature in the same canon - but no worries, right? I was thinking, I probably need about 5k words to do it justice. I can manage 5k even on my current ultra-limited writing time.
Then I was casting around for a plot to hang the ship off, and I decided to draw from one of the cartoons. It's been a few years since I watched Resistance, I was only ever mildly fannish about it and never actually made it all the way to the end, but that wasn't going to matter: I could rewatch some key episodes, skim some Wookieepedia summaries, and since I only needed it as a backdrop, the finer details wouldn't matter. It would let me sneak in a quick cameo appearance by one of recip's other ships but wouldn't eat into my wordcount.
But then I started rewatching Resistance and got waaaay more invested than I planned to. I fell in love with the recip's other ship and developed all sorts of feelings about the characters. My cameo started turning into a major chunk of the fic, and my rewatch was threatening to encroach on my writing time: I'd been watching during windows of downtime when I was too tired to do anything else, which worked fine when it was just a few key episodes but wasn't enough for the more substantial canon review I now needed. Still, I said, she'll be right. My wordcount might blow out to 8k or so but I can get this done if I focus.
But as I was figuring out my plot and trying to prioritise which emotional arcs I'd have time for and which ones would have to get cut (a problem for me, with so many characters I love in play), the prospect of one more cameo kept niggling at the back of my mind. Qi'ra! From Solo! Recip loves her, she's in charge of a crime cartel, how cool would it be if I made her my antagonist instead of the disposable OCs I'd been planning to throw in? Trouble was, with disposable OC antagonists, it was very clear that any plot I came up with would be just a flimsy pretext for ship interactions. If I was going to have an actual beloved character driving things, I would have to do her justice, too. I cannot overstate to you guys how much plotty fic is not my forte. I can do it, and I love doing it, but I'm painfully slow at it - like, I can dash off a couple of thousand words of smut or banter or introspection in the time it takes me to produce a paragraph or two of action. So at this point I was having to go cap in hand to my husband for some major extra help with childcare because writing during naptimes was no longer going to cut it.
Thankfully, he was amazing about it. Poor man sacrificed almost all of his own free time to get me the space I needed to finish what ended up being 13.5k of some of the most complex, too-many-balls-in-the-air-at-once writing I've attempted in years. Here it is, in all its glory! I'm absurdly proud of it, and my imagination is still in overdrive about the whole extended version it spawned in my head. It even has 4 kudos, which is 3 more kudos than I ever expected it to get.
Anyway - now we're at the punchline - reveals day came around and it turns out my recip not only wrote for me in return but basically joined me in a surprise round robin! Like, theirs is the get-together, mine is the three-years-later established relationship. Same core cast, same canon divergence, same complicated polyship. If the premise of 'Ben survives Exegol and goes on to have complicated relationships with a whole bunch of Resistance heroes' sounds even a tiny bit appealing to you, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:
All the Stars in the Sky (7571 words) by ambiguously
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Finn/Rose Tico & Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Finn/Rose Tico/Poe Dameron/Jacen Syndulla
Characters: Poe Dameron, Jacen Syndulla, Rey (Star Wars), Finn (Star Wars), Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, POV Poe Dameron, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Canonical Character Death
Summary: Poe has a lot of problems left to deal with after the Battle of Exegol.
TV shows
As mentioned above, I've been (re)watching Resistance and enjoying it SO much more than I remember doing last time. It's first and foremost a fun, goofy show aimed at a somewhat younger audience than the other cartoons, but it also has some really thoughtful messages about how far right organisations recruit by exploiting people's natural cravings for belonging and security. The whole cast are pretty much all lovable, but I'm especially taken with Synara and Tam
I also started The Bad Batch, which until now I'd correctly but misleadingly lumped in with TCW as Clone Stuff(TM). Like yes they're clones, and Clone Stuff(TM) doesn't usually interest me very much, but these clones are living their best Accidental Child Acquisition lives! If Disney wants to milk The Mandalorian's success forever by churning out an endless stream of gruff action heroes adopting and protecting small children, I think I'm actually okay with that. I'm still early in season 1 so no idea where it's all going, but I'm enjoying myself a lot so far.
Comics
I read Crimson Reign and Hidden Empire, in which Qi'ra leads Crimson Dawn and an assortment of other criminals and miscreants (prominently including the Knights of Ren) on a campaign to end the rule of the Sith. The plot revolves a McGuffin that can literally freeze people in time and is a bit silly even by Star Wars standards, but it clips along at a great pace and has some truly heartwrenching Qi'ra moments. It's a fairly large crossover event, and I've grabbed all the other tie-ins that my library had, so I'll be reading those at some point soon. Doctor Aphra is involved!
Video games
I started playing Squadrons, which is the first flight simulator I've ever touched. This experience has taught me that I don't like playing flight simulators, but I do like watching them played, and luckily my husband is not the kind of man you have to pressure very hard to pick up a game controller. It's an enjoyably different perspective on the big Star Wars adventure, since you're playing ordinary pilots on both the Rebel and Imperial side, nobody important. There's also an embarrassingly hot Imperial NPC named Terisa Kerrill, who's portrayed by an Aussie actress, which is nice! It's not Mandatory Star Wars Content by any stretch, but it's a good bit of fun.
